Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Eldritch: Halloween 030

So, in short… Seamus doesn’t age.And he can jump through time… but only forward.Oh, and he doesn’t pick when, but at least he can feel it coming on.That kind of sucks.

Time travel is tricky, and it’s way too easy to abuse it.If he had absolute control over time, he could go back in time and ‘save’ faith from being bitten… but that would create a time paradox.By forcing Seamus to only go forward, it allows me to play with time travel, but not in a way that can alter the consistency of the story.It also makes him somewhat of a tragic character.In this way, he’s a bit different from the initial incarnation I had of him.

When I first started coming up with Seamus as a character back around 2006, he was simply what I called the style of writing I used when writing my italicized descriptions for several of my pieces.Unlike in Eldritch, he had no real family, because his main love was books. I playfully said he was from Neverwhen… that is, he resides in no time or place in particular, and can pop up anywhere and anywhen.Well, for the aforementioned reasons, that wasn’t going to work for Eldritch.It’d make it way too easy to make him a power character, and frankly, I know I’m not talented enough to handle a super-complex time travel story with a character that isn’t even the main one.

However, where it counts… Seamus is pretty much the same.He loves science and myth and magic… he loves researching and of course… talking to others about it.A Lot.Besides, you can’t blame a guy for cramming as much information as he can into a conversation, since he never knows if he might accidentally leave or not.